As the OPEC oil producing countries have lost incentive to undertake huge amount of investment to maintain the output ceiling, the Non-OPEC states have their own problem in this respect.
A combination of falling production and rising domestic consumption could wipe out Mexico's exports within five years, including the 1.5 million barrels it sends to the United States each day.
Another country, Russia, is also troubling analysts' forecasts.
The country is not exactly running out of places to look for oil - a huge part of Eastern Siberia remains unexplored - and Russia has been the biggest contributor to the growth in energy supplies in the last decade.
But this month, Russian energy officials warned that the days of stunning growth that followed the demise of the Soviet Union were over, as the country would focus on stabilizing its output. Russia today produces about 10 million barrels of oil a day, up from a low point of 6 million barrels in 1996.
About 75 percent of the world's oil reserves are in OPEC countries, where governments voluntarily restrict their output to push up prices.
As countries like Russia slow output, analysts say OPEC will have to pick up the slack. The oil cartel currently accounts for 40 percent of the world's oil exports.
Further clouding the picture, Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, signaled last week that it might have trouble increasing its production.
Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC, signaled it would freeze any further expansion after next year.
That dims the long-range outlook for OPEC supplies, though in the near term, Saudi Arabia is expected to loom larger in the market as it completes a $50 billion plan to increase its capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day.
Yet that leaves it well short of the 15 million barrels that most experts say they expected the kingdom to produce in the long run.
OPEC's 13 members say they plan to spend $150 billion to expand capacity by five million barrels a day by 2012, according to estimates by the cartel. But that also falls short of most projections that say OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the planned growth in demand.
Not everyone has a pessimistic outlook. The US Energy Department forecasts sustained growth in non-OPEC supplies this year and next.
A study by the National Petroleum Council, an industry group that provides advice to the secretary of energy, outlined a variety of possibilities for oil expansion, and concluded that the world still had plenty of petroleum resources that could be tapped.
In fact, high prices have sparked a global dash for oil. Companies are trawling deep oceans or seeking to drill in the Arctic Ocean.
In some cases, the hunt has been successful. Brazil, for example, has struck large offshore discoveries that could turn the country into one of the world's top 10 producers in the coming decade. Yet it takes years to bring such remote fields into production, and the market needs oil now.
To make up the shortfall, the world is increasingly turning to fuels made from unconventional sources, like biofuels or heavy oil.
Canadian tar sands, for example, have attracted large investments, and biofuels have accounted for much of the growth in fuel supplies in the last two years.
The International Energy Agency, an adviser to industrialized countries, estimates that current investments will be insufficient to replace declining oil production, let alone increase overall output.
The energy agency said it would take $5.4 trillion by 2030 to bolster global output, a level of investment that is unlikely to be met.
It said a crisis "involving an abrupt run-up in prices" could not be ruled out before 2015. --IRNA
oil
No comments:
Post a Comment